Bonus Test Kitchen: Cranberry-Maple Pudding Cake

So you might remember in last week’s test kitchen, I had to buy cranberries for garnish in my Maple Sugar-Ginger Roast Pork. While it made the dish pretty and festive, I had a whole bag of cranberries in my refrigerator.

Not wanting to let the cranberries go to waste, I looked for a recipe that featured cranberries. That’s when I found this Cranberry Pudding Cake recipe that I clipped out from an old Bon Appétit magazine. I remembered the photograph of the bright red cranberries against the yellow cornmeal-like pudding that really made this dish look enticing. So I thought I’d make that as a bonus test kitchen.

The recipe makes 6 to 8 servings, but I wasn’t about to eat all that myself since I had to use heavy cream. (And I’ve pretty much pushed the limits on my cholesterol during this holiday season.) So I cut back the recipe and instead of making a whole baking dish of cake, I used two soufflé cups for individual servings.

You can find the recipe on the epicurious.com Web site. And this is how it went in my kitchen.

I started off by cooking the cranberries along with maple syrup, heavy cream, and grated orange peel. This pretty much sounds like the beginnings of a classic cranberry sauce, but it’s going to be a filler for the pudding/cake. I only had to simmer the cranberries for about a minute (I guess because it’ll cook more in the oven).

After whisking together the dry ingredients like flour and cornmeal, I whisked one large egg with the sugar.

Once that was done, I slowly added the dry ingredients to the egg mixture and got something close to cake batter.

Now I assembled my cranberry pudding/soufflés by putting some of the cranberry mixture into each of the soufflé cups. Then I topped them off with the cake batter. I placed them on a baking sheet and put the whole thing in a 400° oven to cook for about 28 minutes, or until golden brown.

Here it is piping hot out of the oven. It was a little bit more than golden brown but it still looked pretty appetizing. You can see that the cranberry underneath had bubbled up and made much mess along the sides. Afterwards, I thought it probably would have looked nicer for the presentation if I had dropped the cake batter in clumps so that some of the cranberry juices could bubble up in between from the center. Something to consider for the next time, I guess.

The recipe calls for topping the pudding cake with either whipping cream, crème fraîche, or vanilla ice cream. I had whipping cream in the refrigerator so that’s what I used, and you can see the warm cranberry pudding cake was melting the whipped cream as I tried to quickly take the picture.

Just from looking at the cake, you can’t really tell its cranberries other than the hint of red along the edges. So here’s a picture of a spoonful of the bottom of the cake that’s supposed to be the pudding part.

In the end, the cranberry pudding cake was a nice, warm dessert. Except I thought the cranberry portion tasted a bit tart. It probably would’ve been better to add some sugar when cooking the cranberries and not just rely on the maple syrup. I couldn’t even taste any maple syrup flavor. I’m not sure why they call this recipe a pudding when it really is just a cake with a gooey center.

Still, it was pretty easy to make and can be a very quick dessert or sweet breakfast dish the morning after Christmas. Enjoy!